No one realises just how clever the Conservative strategy to destroy Labour is

The battle for British votes used to be pretty simple: The
Conservatives would propose right-wing policies that generally
favoured business and often hurt the poor. Labour would oppose
those policies, putting forward a gentler vision that shaved the
rough edges off capitalism. The public chose between them,
swinging back and forth through the middle ground, depending on
how well the parties performed.

But since the Conservatives won the 2015 election, the game has
become a lot more complicated — and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party
appears not to have noticed.

Weirdly, the Tories are adopting a lot of moderate and soft-left
positions, the kind of positions that the Labour Party used to
have.

Corbyn needs to wake up and realise just how much policy ground
he's ceding to the Tories, unless he wants his party to end
up relegated into permanent minority status. A lot of potential
voters in the South — who tend to be less left-wing than those in
the North — might easily conclude that they won't need a Labour
government if Cameron is delivering a minimal level of
Labour-like policies.

The Tories ought to be an easy kill for Labour:

Prime Minister David Cameron is like a cartoon
Conservative: The son of a stockbroker and a judge.
Went to Eton and then Oxford. Personal friend of Jeremy
Clarkson. Related to the Queen. His ancestry is a Monty
Pythonesque: His great-great-great-grandfather was William
Feilding, 7th Earl of Denbigh, GCH, PC, Gentleman of the
Bedchamber.

The favourite to succeed him as Tory leader for the
2020 vote is Boris Johnson, who is a continuation of that
cartoon: His mother was the illegitimate granddaughter
of Prince Paul of Württemberg and he is also a descendant of
King George II. He is an eighth cousin to Cameron.

You couldn't ask for a better pair of upper-class fops to prove
that Britain is class-society ruled by an hereditary
gentry.

But those are merely the appearances. Here's a list of recent
Tory policies:

Minimum wage increased to £7.20, and a "living wage" of up to
£9.15 in London.

Yes, this is cherry-picking. And the tax credit was only under
threat in the first place because George Osborne threatened it.

But if this basket of policies had been proposed by a Labour
government, the Tories would have accused Corbyn of being a
tax-and-spend socialist who uses others' money to pay for
government programmes.

Boris Johnson presses the
flesh.Peter Nicholls /
REUTERS

Johnson, should he succeed Cameron, is similarly (and
infamously) non-ideological. For instance, Johnson is in
favour of both Crossrail 2 and HS2, the two massive rail projects
for London and Manchester, respectively.

There used to be a time when Conservatives were against giant
government-paid building projects, the kind of projects that
Labour traditionally has urged.

But now the Tories like them, too.

It's worth reminding ourselves just how badly Labour got wiped
out in last election, and the scale of the task it now faces if
the party ever wants to form a government again. Labour now
controls just 232 seats to the Tories' 331.
Labour must persuade 106 more seats — mostly in the
South — to vote its way in order to win in 2020,
according to one Labour policy group's analysis.

This isn't an impossible task. As Business Insider has argued
before, the swing of votes actually favoured Labour this year
even though the maths didn't deliver the seats.
Former leader
Ed Miliband added 700,000 new votes to Labour's total in the
last election. That is momentum that can be built on:

Labour's best bet, therefore, is to hunker down and grind out the
kind of nuts-and-bolts, common-sense constituency service work
and doorstep campaigning that would convince voters in the
South, where Labour needs to win seats. Labour ought to be
talking about spurring small businesses, tech startups, and
supporting employees in the private sector — where the vast
majority of workers actually are. This is traditional Tory stuff,
but Labour doesn't have much to say about it. There is no reason
Labour can't start fighting on this ground. Plenty of
entrepreneurs have left-wing views. They just happen to run
businesses while they have them. But you don't hear that coming
from Labour.

Corbyn's recent trips have been to Liverpool, Lancaster,
Scunthorpe and Swansea — all classic Labour strongholds. Just not
territory that Labour needs to win.

Corbyn has chosen as a shadow chancellor a former NUM and NUPE
trade unionist, who can quote Mao. He's the kind of person who
would be perfect if unemployment was over 10% and you were
fighting a Tory government that didn't want to build any
railways. The exact opposite of the situation we have now, in
other words.